Two Million Customers = Good Business =
Two Million Kids Drugged on Stimulant Medications by Rob Kallwww.dissidentvoice.org
November 29,
2003

What
would you think of this idea. Identify two million kids who have the
personality and inclination to be great hunters. Then drug them throughout
their childhood to block those tendencies so they become obedient little
drones.

Thatís pretty much whatís
been going on for the last 10-15 years. The first person to describe
children with attention deficit disorder as "hunters in a farmers world" was
Thom Hartmann, author of over a dozen books on A.D.D. and ADHD. Since then,
Johns Hopkins researchers have reiterated this theory that kids and adults
with Attention deficit disorder have characteristics that work very well for
hunters and not very well for farmers. And lets face it, teachers and
administrators in the average school classroom want neat, organized, docile,
neatly lined up in a row farmer types, not free-ranging, roving, intense
when on the track of game, hunters.

So, the pharmaceutical
companies came up with a multi-billion dollar profit solution. Drug these
millions of kids. Turn them into obedient, neat and organized little farmers
who pay attention to boring teachers, who sit quietly, who paint inside the
lines, who donít wander off the beaten path. The US consumes more Ritalin,
the most commonly prescribed ADHD stimulant drug, than all the rest of the
world combined.

But itís not fair to just
blame the teachers and administrators and pharmaceutical companies. There
are all those doctors who write the prescriptions and all the parents who
ask for them to be written. Well, not all parents ask to have their kids
doped up. Some donít like the idea. Some seek alternatives, and they are out
there.

Itís outrageous, but with a
"plague" of ADHD affecting millions of kids, costing billions of dollars in
drugs, medical visits, special educational services, youíd think that at
least millions of dollars would be spent on research on ways to help these
kids without drugs. But it doesnít work that way. The pharmaceutical
companies do research, using their profits. But the schools get money for
"special needs" children. So they donít necessarily have the incentive to
mainstream them.

One approach to ADHD that
is non-drug is neurofeedback. Itís a simple concept. Train the brain to be
less excited so as to reduce the hyperactivity and at the same time, train
the brain to decrease the proportion of distractable brain waves while
increasing the proportion of alert and attentive brainwaves. The first
research on this was done with cats. They could learn and most kids can
learn it too. Instead of drugging the hunter strengths out of these kids,
biofeedback enables hunter children and adults to also function better in
the classroom. Yet there has been almost no funding made available for this
and other non-drug approaches to helping kids diagnosed with ADHD to
function better in classrooms.

Letís talk about modern day
hunters. Outside of the Arctic, where indigenous "Eskimos" still hunt for
caribou, seal, whale and bear, (where 95% of students are identified as
ADHD) in contemporary USA culture, hunters are alive and doing very well as
entrepreneurs, reporters, detectives, programmers, surgeons, ER docs, repair
and trades people (auto, computer, home, plumbers, electrician,
construction, heating and air conditioning, landscaping) researchers....
itís a great list of people at all levels of education and income.

In many countries, there is
no such diagnosis as ADHD -- no diagnosis, no problem. The main countries
where it is identified as a problem are the U.S., Australia and Israel. One
expert has suggested that these are countries that are composed primarily of
immigrants, people who had enough ants in their pants to get up and leave
their homeland and move to another country. Not surprisingly, these
countries are known as leaders in research and innovation.

A hundred years from now,
the use of stimulant medications like Ritalin and Concerta will be viewed
with the same sentiments with which we now view the craziness of the Salem
witch trials -- as an era of cultural insanity.

One major part of the
problem is our school system. It was designed, as it now operates, to be a
system to turn out obedient factory workers and foot soldiers. At a time
when manufacturing jobs are becoming obsolete and even soldiering in the US
requires creativity and innovation we need to take another look at how we
handle the promise and strengths of kids who are labeled ADHD because they
have hunter traits. We need to build an alternate system for educating them
that makes the most of their strengths and that utilizes available
technologies like neurofeedback brain training to enable them to take self
responsibility for their success and to maximize their ability to contribute
to our culture, instead of having the culture turn them into juvenile drug
users.

We need to make conscious
choices about our children rather than allowing policy to be driven by the
"market," which is really controlled by pharmaceutical companies and doctors
who get all their education from free, pharmaceutical company funded
seminars. And be assured the role of pharmaceutical companies is very strong
in this. The drugging of millions of American kids is in a large part due to
the profit motive. Sometimes free capitalism doesnít watch where it steps.

What's the solution? Fund
research into non-drug alternatives, prevent pharmaceutical companies from
corrupting the health care system with training that only offers drug
alternatives, develop alternative school and education models for "hunter"
children (A few such schools already exist.) And talk about this problem.
Too many parents and children have bought the ADHD as disease instead of as
difference line. The word needs to get out that people who are ADD or ADHD
are different, that they have their own strengths and gifts.

From a political point of
view, the NRA ought to want to protect potential hunters, and liberals ought
to want to protect potential cultural creatives. that makes this a potential
bi-partisan issue.

Rob
Kall is president of
Futurehealth Inc. Heís an entrepreneur who is also diagnosable as A.D.D.
He is publisher of Op Ed
News.com, a progressive news and opinion website:
www.opednews.com. He can be reached
at: rob@futurehealth.org. This article is copyright by Rob
Kall, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, blog, or web
media so long as this entire credit paragraph is attached.